Repository: UIHistories Project: Dedication - Home Economics - Challenge of Home Economics [PAGE 47]

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terdependcncics arc all around us. The engineering know-how to erect beautiful Bevier Hall is the result of research, education and business through the ages. Much of the same knowledge involved in creating such beauty and utility is used every day to develop better equipment for every possible use, and it carries over into my own field — nutrition. The dependence of science on tools and techniques is thoughtprovoking, to say the least, I take it as a sign of growth that we use freely the work and ideas of others and the opportunities all around us. But to make us comfortable about our creative cribbing: Wasn't it Emerson who said that when we live with an idea, absorb it and use it, the idea becomes our own. I personally can never repay what I have received from books and from the many warm and helpful people with whom I've been privileged to work. I've helped myself to the ideas of others — put them through the mill of my own mind and coordinated them to suit my countless needs. There arc people here today to whom I shall be eternally grateful for the helping hand, the stimulating idea and example. It is a thrilling thought that the creative mind that stimulates a child or young person — or oldster, for that matter — to grow becomes a part of that person's thoughts and activities from then on. "The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn." Here is where the challenge lies, to my way of thinking — to accept our legacy from others, then strive to grow so that what we pass on to the future will stimulate our heirs to richer giving in their turn. I go on in this philosophic vein — not to belabor the point—'but because business is so beholden to others and to so many disciplines. Business takes freely from both the present and the past. Take my own company, SUNKIST, for example. Chemistry, physics, economics, psychology, and the arts all are an integral part of every activity of SUNKIST GROWERS. Think of the interdependencies of one knowledge on another: in breeding the best strains of oranges and lemons; in growing sturdy, productive trees; in selecting, protecting and pampering the sweet juicy fruit for shipping; in marketing that fruit to families all over the world; and in producing the by-products that will share with fresh fruit in building the profit structure which keeps SUNKIST GROWERS, INC., the live and growing cooperative that it is in Southern California. I do not have the answers as to just what is the challenge for Home Economics in Business, but because I accepted the invitation to be here today I've been obliged to do something in that direction. 47